Wildflowers

Accompanied by my daughter and grandson we followed the ribbon of asphalt as it undulated and snaked its way through the Texas Hill Country. We drove the five hundred miles from South Texas to the high plains city of Lubbock…on our way to grandmother’s house. It was Easter weekend and we were to fetch my wife who had spent the last two weeks visiting and caring for her mother, the family matriarch, whose descendants now numbered one hundred and three…equaling the number of candles on her birthday cake. She has lived a life as colorful and vibrant as the wildflowers that carpet the Texas roadsides in spring and early summer. As we motored our way along the hills and dells we marveled at the numerous Yellow Daisy, Desert Marigolds and Buttercups…the Bluebonnets, Mountain Laurel and Purple Vetch…the White Bull Nettle, Wild Azaleas and Prickly Poppy…the Crimson Clover, Wine Cup and pink Indian Paint Brush. The flora and vegetation seemed particularly vivid and intense this year.

I couldn’t help but think of this remarkable, energetic woman who lead such an amazing life on the west Texas high plains…no stranger to a buckboard, hunting rifle or one room school house…she married late in life…birthed and raised ten children…mostly by herself after her husband died while the youngest was still in diapers. She taught countless second-graders to read…until retiring…well into her seventies.

Each year the flowers bloom in the spring and fade in the summer heat and die in the fall.
My mother–in–law is in the autumn of her life and fading. She is slowing down with each passing day…getting closer to the inevitable that we all must face. Each day bringing us all closer to the unavoidable reality…whether we want to accept it or not…each day brings us all closer to the reality of death…life’s strange paradox…living to die and dying to live.

Whoever thought of celebrating Easter during springtime had a good idea…life renewed…I see the resurrection of new life blooming all around me.

It all sounds so simple from an unattached intellectual standpoint but it’s not…when you know and love someone who mean so much to you it’s impossible to even think the unthinkable without tearing up and gasping for breath. It will be a sad day…sad for us because we will miss her, but a joyous day for her. A new life in a better place. She will finally leave her beloved old pink brick ranch style house…she will be in God’s house…God’s house with no plumbing problems. Hallelujah!

Someday…maybe someday…we will all line the roadsides of heaven each adding a glimmer of beauty to God’s highways and byways.

For this I pray
Amen